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It is half past two, and I am on a coach heading away from London. It is half past two, and I will be on a coach heading to Glasgow until ten to eight.

Every other bugger but me has put out their light, put down their head and gone to, if not sleep, at least some sort of waking delirium. I am a little island of white. I am a crystal jellyfish in an ocean of cut-price public transport. I have four hearts in my pocket and I am very, very happy.

Plastic hearts, I should stress. This was neither the aftermath of Aztecan revelry, nor an ill-considered metaphor for my feminine wiles – especially not the latter; I look like God ran out of faces and had to make do. No, these are cute little pixel hearts printed on cute little plastic rectangles, and they stand as testament to how bad Grant Howitt is at Rock, Paper Scissors.

I love you, Grant Howitt. I love you and your drunken lack of pattern recognition.

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The only game which ever taught me anything was a real classic. Old-school graphics, retro platform, only one real mechanic to speak of: walk through a glass maze, try not to get bruises.

I was-

An indeterminate age. Something-teen. More than four, less than seven. I’d be specific, but my retroactive timestamping reference points – Lord of the Rings films, one Tuesday afternoon, which sibling had cut off which parent – stop working after fourteen. Remove the impossible. Spin the wheel.

-fifteen, it was October, and the Taro Fair was in town.

It was an old-fashioned thing that rolled up once a year and spread itself out across the Heath, spilling stalls and games and rides onto damp grass. In Autumn, it would have been a charming small-town tradition. In Winter, it was a charming small-town flu generator.

I love Dark Souls. I’d have to – I’ve invested over 100 hours and I don’t plan on stopping. It’s a great series and well deserving of most of the excessive praise it gets.

Most of, because a ton of that praise focuses on the game’s approach to its story; something I struggle to understand since it doesn’t have one.

You see fanboys throwing around statements like…

‘You just have to work to get it.’

Well yes and no, because you work like fuck to get it and what you get is fuck all. Dark Souls tells its story in tiny scraps which don’t ever piece together into a big picture.

Some details can be found by chance, but these are infrequent, easily missable, and invariably insubstantial. Weapon descriptions and snippets of character dialogue may hide the backstories of bosses or some small fragment of overarching story, but more often than not these things simply go unexplained. And even if you go to the bother of collecting them, these hidden details barely add to the story. They’re snippets of a nonexistent whole.

There’s two reasons. 1: Life fell over on my head a bit – unlike the other two on here, who are just lazy bastards1 – and 2: I was doing some writing stuff for BT, and completely forgot that I had a blog.

It’s not much of an excuse. It wasn’t even much writing. But it’s my excuse and I’m clinging like a barnacle. If you want to see the stuff I wrote, there’s links below the cut. Frivolous (but what’s wrong with frivolity?) stuff, for the most part, but I do still quite like the review of Thief 4.

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The Rock, Paper, Shotgun community is terrifyingly hostile to women and there’s nothing RPS can do to fix it.

Yeah, we’re gonna start this on a downer and work our way up. There’s a light at the end of this. Well, thoughts about a light, at least. There’s visualisations of a desk lamp at the end of this.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the fuck out of RPS. It’s the only gaming site I visit regularly. When I see one of their contributors elsewhere, I perk up a bit and check out the piece. But you can’t say their vocal reader base is…without its issues.

This is why you don’t get many women posting on sites like this. Even if some of the articles are supportive, the comments are anywhere between misogynistic and sociopathic.

…

But don’t be surprised if there are women out there who talk in places you don’t visit in rather disappointed tones about you. Exactly you. Shaking their head, at you, because they can’t help but see you as a little bit sad.

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There are few games built around advertising that don’t force their product down players’ throats, and Doritos Crash Course was one of those precious few. Think Total Wipeout minus Richard Hammond’s lack of comedic delivery and you’re about there.

GTA V is a casual game because it is played by casual gamers. It is also played by guys who keep the fridge by the sofa and piss into empty bottles to avoid putting down the controller, and a whole bunch of people inbetween.

But the biggest market, the ones who are going to really be driving the sales, are people who like to play something brainless when there’s nothing good on and the pub seems too far away.

Like my neighbour: a gym bunny who plays local league footie and only turns on the Xbox when both those pursuits are off. Or if the salmon fishing has been cancelled this weekend. And he will be playing GTA V, because he chooses games by walking into GAME and walking out with whatever looks brainless and shooty. His current way of wiling away the half-hours is Sniper Elite V2.

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‘Men Only’, it says. Because there is nothing more heterosexual than a group of guys isolated from the opposite sex and basking in the glow of each other’s horniness. It’s why the Royal Navy has always been so famously straight.

Wartune is a browser-based RPG. My brief glances at its website haven’t revealed anything that might keep a person busy for weeks, but I admit tits are not my area of expertise. Maybe the game is full of them. Maybe it is full to bursting point with barely-covered knockers. Maybe it is actually set on a single, mountainous breast.

With Corporal Wonderbra being shoved in your face, it’s difficult to notice pretty much anything else accompanying the awfulness. One thing seems to have been overlooked, though: Kojima said he designs characters with the primary intent “to make u [sic] want to do cosplay or its figurine to sell well”.

At first I wasn’t sure if he was serious as, up until now, I understood that the man was valued as a fantastic – if overcomplicated – storyteller who could create rich and interesting characters. But then I saw the accompanying woman who could fit all of her clothing into the holster of her gun and wondered how rich and interesting fishnet-wrapped thighs could be.

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Dead Island was a glitch-ridden shitload of fun and Riptide could have advanced that loveable formula. But it added the one thing that undid everything: Water. It added fucking water.

A trivial addition, it may first seem. A harmless new terrain packed with pockets of splash-happy fun with your friends. There’s boats, too, for zipping around the swamplands and flattening the undead. How we laughed as their bodies ground against the hull! How we cackled as their armless remains flailed in our wave trail! We felt unstoppable.